Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products. Customers are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with the customer's query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available.
Contact Centers are also known which deal with other media types of call such as email, video, voice over Internet protocol, and others.
The terms “call center” and “Contact Center” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, SMS, chat, web access, video access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the terms “call” and “contact” as used herein are not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but include contacts made by email, fax, voice over IP and any other suitable medium.
FIG. 1 shows a schematic diagram of a known arrangement for Network Level Routing Contact Center Set-up. The system includes a user interface 10, which is traditionally a voice interface, (either traditional PSTN TDM based or via Voice over IP or from a Mobile Phone). The system includes a number of gateways, 20, 30, 40 which are the gateways between the user and the routing intelligence in the middle of the network and may be for example, an IP PBX, a wireless gateway or a PSTN gateway. The system further includes a Network Level Router (NLR) 50 (also referred to as a Pre-termination Router) and one or more Contact Centers 60, 70, 80.
When the user dials for Contact Center service, the gateways 20, 30, 40, either route the call onto the NLR 50 or they consult with the NLR to determine where the call should be directed to, (e.g. to which of the Contact Centers). In order to be able to determine which Contact Center is best to handle the call, the NLR gathers information from the range of possible Contact Center termination points, and this information is gathered in the form of real-time stats or real-time state information 100.
The NLR uses this gathered information to determine what the current wait time is in the Contact Center queue or which Contact Center has the Longest Idle Agent. It may be application dependent as to what criteria the NLR uses to pick the best Contact Center for this call.
Once the NLR has made the determination and selected the Contact Center which is most appropriate to the call, the call is routed either through the NLR or redirected at the Gateway to the “best” Contact Center for this call 120.
The customer is then connected to the Contact Center where they receive the normal queueing treatment etc. before they get connected and are able to speak to a Contact Center Agent.
Alternatively the customer's call 90 can be queued at the network-level by the NLR 50 until using the state information 100 the NLR determines that an agent is available at one of the Contact Centers 60, 70, 80. The NLR would then complete the call 120 to the appropriate Contact Center and the customer would be directly connected to an available agent within that Contact Center.
These methods have the benefit that the NLR can optimise the usage of the Contact Centers by Load Balancing (sharing calls between each Call Center in an intelligent manner based on who is busiest). Furthermore, if the NLR application is to find the shortest wait time for the caller (as opposed to the Longest Idle Agent) then the caller may also receive benefits in that their queuing time is optimised.
However, the NLR is likely to have to select between a number of Contact Centers and these Contact Centers are likely to be provided by different manufacturers. This causes difficulties for the NLR because the nature of the Real Time Feed 100 is proprietary to the Contact Center vendor and therefore the NLR must act as a gateway to collate and unify this information from disparate sources and in different formats. Often this also requires the placement of proprietary gateway/normalization equipment (not shown in FIG. 1) at each of the Contact Centers whose function it is to interface with the local Contact Center, normalize its real-time information and interface the normalised real-time information 100 to the NLR.